Perched on the north-eastern tip of the Cox Peninsula, Wagait Beach can seem very isolated or not isolated at all, depending on how you travel there.
The outpost, girt by gorgeous beaches and fishing spots, is either a 10-minute ferry ride across Darwin harbour or a 120-kilometre drive around it, along roads lined with ant hills and pandanus palms.
Wagait Beach is geographically close to Darwin but removed from it institutionally, and that's a key reason why people live there, often on large rural blocks, paying the lowest rates in the Northern Territory.
The town's population of about 460 live with no schools, industry or tourism ventures apart from a country club.
"Similarly we don't have any hospitals or doctors, but we do have a clinic which is open twice a week for two hours," Peter Clee, the president of the Wagait Shire Council, said.
Many in the township are older single residents, often female, or families with young children, which can put pressure on the meagre local emergency services when disaster threatens.
"They're the two groups we would be most concerned about in any disaster situation: the young families and the older single residents," Chris Tyzack, who voluntarily manages the community's small recovery committee, said.
"One of the big issues is that about four hours after the power goes out the telephone towers die, so there's no landlines, no internet," Mr Clee said.
"It makes it difficult for the services to communicate with each other — that's the real issue."
One solution has been to erect a cheeseboard with handwritten updates next to the road leading in and out of the town.
It's a typical stroke of character in the small township, which has the same risk of cyclones as Darwin but in which the emergency recovery is almost entirely volunteer-led.
The firefighter of 50 years
Ray Nicholls is an important piece in the town's custom of battling disaster with community.
The firefighting volunteer has twice stepped down from his role as captain on doctor's orders — smoke aggravates his worsening emphysema — but his 50 years of experience mean he's been drawn back in some capacity each time.
Mr Nicholls has fought fires in every state except Western Australia and suffered burns to one side of his body battling the blazes of Ash Wednesday.
"The girls and the young people [who took over the brigade], they just haven't got the experience yet," he said.
"So I said, 'I'll stand in the background; if you need help, just sing out'."
These days he keeps busy lending a hand with pre-season burn-offs, keeping up appearances, and passing his knowledge on — including to Indigenous Kenbi rangers.
"I've done so many barbecues over the years; it's a wonder the people aren't sick of the sausages."
In the hours after Cyclone Marcus swept through the area, Mr Nicholls was one of a group of volunteers in the streets, taking toll of the damage and distributing water.
The rural lots rely on tanks and bores, so no electricity means no water.
It has been said that in the early days of the brigade, payment for private burn-offs was made in cartons of beer.
"We've had some real drinkers out here over the years," Mr Nicholls said.
Knowing the community like the back of his hand has helped him over his 17 years in the community.
"As you probably know now, we haven't got much infrastructure, but what we do have is utilised correctly.
"Nothing's wasted."
Blind spots
The people of Wagait Beach don't feel ignored by the government but blind spots do exist.
"Probably the biggest thing that was identified was the need for a waste disposal site," Mr Clee said.
"We've set up a green waste disposal site here, but had the cyclone damaged the buildings there's nowhere in the Northern Territory that we could put disaster waste."
He said they were lucky during Cyclone Marcus that large trees fell between houses and not through them, though a few lost their guttering and some water tanks are pockmarked with dents.
But the damage looks much worse before you drive into Wagait Beach, with sawn-off logs and snapped trees on either side of the road.
"It also speaks volumes about the volunteers we do have, because if you drive around today you'd barely know that a cyclone came through here," the council's chief executive Mark Sidey said.
In fact, the community prides itself on doing a better job of the clean-up than Darwin.
They are known for being so self-sufficient that they weren't even visited by the two police officers who service the Cox Peninsula.
"They have a call to probably more urgent areas, which is understandable, and they know that we are pretty self-sufficient out here," Mr Clee said.
"I think they're comfortable not coming."
